"And, thank God! no great amount of passengers," replies the conductor. "Otherwise there would have been a howl for grub before now. We've only got two outside those on the sleepers, and one is a woman, and the other a little girl, the daughter of the engineer of the helping locomotive. He's got her in his arms now, as he stands by his engine. Come over and see what he thinks," adds the autocrat of the train, as he trudges off through the snow towards one of the locomotives on the Y. Harry has taken a step to follow him, when he suddenly pauses. He is just outside Miss Travenion's Pullman car, and now, through a window that is slightly open, comes the voice of his divinity, who is seated at one of the organs those cars sometimes had in those days. Curiously enough, the girl whom Buck had reported as having the blues last night, is singing the brightest and merriest of ditties this morning. "By George! It must be because she has plenty to eat," cogitates Lawrence, lighting another cigar on the question. But a few minutes after, in his own car, Mr. Powers chancing to come along, he gets some information which he thinks elucidates the matter. "She's kind o' joyous in there, ain't she, Cap?" says Buck, with a grin. "An' I reckon I did it!" "How?" "Well, this morning, even over her breakfast, which was a long way ahead of any one else's on the train, she didn't have no appetite, and seemed in the dumps; whereupon, I suggested that I had hinted to you that she'd kind o' like company probably." "You infernal--!" cries Lawrence, fire coming into his eye. "If you take hold o' me, Cap, I won't tell you the rest!" remarks the boy, retreating a little before Harry's anger. Then he goes on: "She took it something like you--she got red in the face and said: 'Please don't mention the matter!' quite haughty. Whereupon I thought I'd guessed the p'int, and suggested: 'You an' the Cap must have been havin' a smash-up in California!' And then she got real anxious and nervous, and cried out at me: 'In California!--what do you mean?' So I told her how I'd seen you at Ogden, four or five days after her party left for California, and that I'd told you she'd gone West, and you took the journey, I reckoned, to catch up to her." "And she--" says Lawrence, eagerly. "Oh, she kept on questioning, and the more I told her, the better pleased she looked, and since then she has been quite chirpy, so I reckon I produced her high spirits." "God bless you, Buck!" cries Harry, slapping the boy on the shoulder, and the astonished Arab of the railway moves off with a five-dollar greenback in his hand, wondering what made the Cap so liberal. As for Lawrence, it has suddenly occurred to him that Buck Powers has given Miss Travenion the exact information he had taken Ferdie from California to tell her.